Dispatch from Metz

You've Seen the Blog, Now Buy the Book

2011-08-30T08:15:00.000-07:00

You can now buy a large-format book with the blog entries from the Dispatch from Metz through Blurb at http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2027500. The cost is $112.95. The book contains the text and photos that recount Susie's and my French adventure.

Through the Looking Glass

2011-01-30T10:13:00.000-08:00

This blog, like Susie's, has presented what amounts to an outsider's view of Metz, Lorraine, and France. For the inverse--a native of Metz's view of the United States--check out Chroniques de Floride. The blog is in French, presenting to her home country her impressions of the US; my blog, in English, expressed my impressions of France for people in the US. While her blog focuses on Florida, where she now lives, it also covers places I've lived, like Oregon.

Three Communities of Metz

2011-01-15T12:51:00.000-08:00

Our visit to Metz over Thanksgiving brought us back to three different communities. We felt connected with each.

The first community was Georgia Tech-Lorraine. Jim Foley, my Georgia Tech colleague who made it possible for Susie and me to teach at GTL last spring, was himself at GTL this fall. We had the chance to have dinner with Jim and his wife Marylou at le Bouchon, the very restaurant where we had our first real meal in Metz a year ago. We were also lucky that Jean Sands and Henry Owen, our GLT colleagues, were in town, and so we had a wonderful dinner with them. At GTL proper, we said hi to all of our staff colleagues, whom we were really happy to see.

The second community was the Association Lorraine-Etats Unis. On Monday afternoon I accompanied Susie to the meeting of the association's English conversation group, in which she participated weekly last spring. I'd been to only one meeting, because I usually taught class then. So Susie (and somewhat I) caught up with the regulars, who were as warm and welcoming as usual. Then, on Thursday, we were the association's guests at their Thanksgiving dinner. This proved to be more elegant and elaborate that our usual American celebrations. The dinner took place in the great hall of the Metz Officer's Club, a room lit by chandeliers, decorated with columns, and looked over by an enormous portrait of the Emperor Napoleon I in an ermine robe.

The meal started with a regional cocktail of Champagne and mirabelle liqueur. The main course was, of course, turkey, accompanied by French side dishes. Our contribution was that I read Art Buchwald's traditional Thanksgiving column about the Jour de Merci Donnant. I translated on the fly, but because much of the column involved Frenglish, I'm not sure how effective my recitation proved to be for my audience; people were gracious enough to say that they liked it, though. As someone who's life has bridged both the U.S. and France, I felt completely at home in this gathering of French and Americans dedicated to each other's culture and to their ties across history--and that history resounds with special acuteness in Metz.

The third community was Metz's Jewish community. Susie and I attended Friday night Shabbat services at the Metz synagogue and then, at the invitation of Rabbis Fiszon and Bamberger, joined their families for a celebration of the wedding, in England in three weeks time, of the Bambergers' youngest son. Mme Bamberger and the whole family welcomed us with great warmth. The Bamberger brothers are amazing singers, and they sang through the evening with emotion. We weren't able to attend the wedding, but you can still hear the brothers' celebration via YouTube. We abandoned our Saturday plans of visiting Strasbourg so we could rejoin the congregation for Saturday morning services, which were joyous and moving.

So these were the highlights of our stay in Metz, not only for Thanksgiving week but as the summary of our whole winter and spring. The squares, the markets, the restaurants, the forts, the history, and the arts draw visitors to France and to Metz. The connections to communities stay with us and draw us back to visit again.

Some Concluding Images

2011-01-15T12:35:00.000-08:00

Here are a few concluding images that stick with me as I think back on our visit. The view of the Esplanade, looking west from the Place de la République toward the Moselle, captures a part of Metz's spirit, with dancing waters, rolling forested hills, and a French garden. Metz is also the ancient, medieval and now modern city, with its streets that date back to the Romans, its Cathedral tower part of the unending work of renovation, its combination of roofs of dark slate and red tile, and its mix of buildings of all eras, shapes, sizes and styles. And Metz is a city of people, unseen from the Grande Roue but braving the cold of winter to stroll the narrow streets to prepare for the coming holidays.
And here's an image of the Bras Mort of the Moselle, off the Plan d'Eau and the Canal de Jouy. This is the picture on the desktop of my computer, so I get to be there every day.

Metz: Details

2011-01-14T21:11:00.001-08:00

Display of fruits and vegetables at a market in Metz

Fortress Metz

2011-01-14T21:03:00.000-08:00

From the Museums of Metz, here's a bird's-eye view of Metz and its fortifications in the 17th Century. Just above the cathedral, on the open field at the left of the little island in the Moselle, is where the Temple Neuf now stands. The city walls have mostly now disappeared, except for the ramparts at the junction of the Moselle and Seille, at the right side of the city in this picture. The elaborate fortification on the left was the Porte Serpenoise, now shrunk to an arch. Overall, Metz must have been a formidable defensive position.

Textures

2011-01-14T21:01:00.000-08:00

Building panel, Saint-Julien-les-Metz

Saint-Julien-lès-Metz

2011-01-13T13:43:00.000-08:00

The archives of the Department of the Moselle surmount the village of Saint-Julien-lès-Metz, just north of Metz, across the river Seille. Below the archives, to the west, sits one of the several major forts surrounding Metz. To the north and east lie rolling fields. And downhill to the south of the archives lies the village itself. After our visit to the archives for the exhibition on the expulsions of World War II, Susie and I walked the back to our hotel, a route of about 3.5 kilometers.

Saint-Julien-lès-Metz is a well-heeled village, with nice villas and condominiums. Here are a couple of the villas that we passed during our walk. They're not spectacular, just well-to-do, well-kept, and very French, to my eye.Toward the top of the village, the visitor finds numerous apartment buildings, which I figure are condominiums. These are modern and look up-scale. Here's an example.
Almost all the dwellings of modern Saint-Julien probably date from the 2oth Century. A painting in the Metz art museum shows a view, dated 1833, of Metz from Saint Julien. The city's surrounded by fields instead of houses.
Here's a view, roughly from the same direction but not as high up, taken during our visit in November of 2010. You can still see the cathedral, but buildings now completely fill in the landscape.

Faces of Metz

2011-01-13T13:41:00.000-08:00

Esplanade, Metz

The Place de la République

2011-01-12T10:25:00.000-08:00

All during our stay in Metz last year, the Place de la République was a mess, torn up and muddy, with its construction spilling over into the adjacent boulevard and turning the city's largest bus hub into a crazy quilt of displaced bus stops. On our return for Thanksgiving, all the work was finished and the square's holiday activities were in full swing. We arrived on a Sunday, and the square had just been officially reopened on Saturday afternoon.

The most obvious feature was a temporary one: an enourmous Ferris wheel that was visible for miles around. And at the base of the Ferris wheel stood seasonal attractions, including a branch of the Metz Christmas fair, which had been sidelined last year, and an ice-skating rink.

The various venues of the Christmas fair--the train station, the Place St. Louis, the Place St. Jacques, the Place de la Republique--have different decorative themes. At la gare, the booths look like railroad cars. At the Place St. Jaques, the booths have fanciful roofs, over which hangs a net of shimmering stars. At the Place de la Rep', the booths represent, I think, chalets.
Throngs of people, mostly young, flocked to the ice-skating rink. Individuals had varying levels of evident skill, and tumbles were common. Everyone, with exception of perhaps a small crying child, seemed to be having fun.
Other than the fountain on the Esplanade, the ice-skating rink represented the area's only water feature, and a frozen one at that. Come summer, the Place de la Rep' should be flowing with water features. There's even a "beach" built on a wooden deck.
The Grande Roue, whose loading structure also reflected the chalet style, towered above the area. This massive machine, on which Susie and I rode, of course, turns out to be from Germany; it was made by the Great Wheel Corporation of Munich.

From the top of the Grande Roue we could see far and wide. We easily spotted Metz's new permanent landmark, the Centre Pompidou-Metz. You can also see the train station's water tower at the left.
Closer to home, we could find the apartment we stayed in while living in Metz during the winter and spring. Our building was the one with the gray roof in the center of the photograph.
After our revolutions on the Grande Roue, we looked back at it and the Place de la République from the Esplanade. Even when the wheel and rink are gone, the Messins will have a great public space to enjoy.

The Liberation of Metz, November, 1944

2011-01-11T12:08:00.000-08:00

November 20, 2010, the day Susie and I boarded the airplane to return to Metz, coincidentally marked the 66th anniversary of the city's liberation by American forces. The liberation of Metz was a hellish task, as the city and its surrounding were among the most heavily fortified in Europe.
The tourist office, on the north side of the square bordered by both the cathedral and the hotel de ville, displayed a banner commemorating the liberation. On the south side, opposite the banner, a plaque on the base of a statue marks the place where General Walker of the U.S. Army handed over to the French authorities the city liberated by his troops. The mayor's office placed a ceremonial bouquet under the plaque.

Many more bouquets surrounded the monument honoring the U.S. Army's 95th Infantry Division, the Iron Men of Metz. Among the tributes, just below "Metz," was a red-white-and-blue floral arrangement from the Association Lorraine-Etats Unis.

The Moselle in World War II

2011-01-10T18:00:00.000-08:00

"De gré ou de force, l'expulsion des Mosellans 1940-1945" ("By will or by force, the expulsion of the people of the Mosell") is the current exhibition of the Departmental Archives of the Moselle. It follows logically from the Archives' previous exhibition, which covered the evacuation of people from region to other places in France that were less likely to be close to battles. The Archives did remarkable work for both exhibitions.

In the pre-war evacuation, the French government moved inhabitants of the Moselle region, especially those closest to the German border, to places of relative safety in other parts of France. As documented in the Archives' prior exhibition, "Un exil interieure: L'evacauation des Mosellans," about 300,000 people from the Moselle moved in September 1939 and May, 1940 to regions closer to the Atlantic. After the French capitulation in September, 1940, most of these people returned to their homes in the Moselle.

The current exhibition documents the brutal wartime expulsions, part of the Nazi plan to "Germanify" the Moselle. This region, considered by the Nazis to be not occupied France but rather an integral part of Germany, saw 100,000 inhabitants expelled as "undesirables."

Some left willingly, others only when forced. For the most part, they were French speakers who didn't fit into the victors' vision of a German Moselle. The Nazi authorities limited the expulsed to 2,000 Francs and 110 pounds of baggage; everything else--houses, furniture, clothes, shops, factories, dishes, toys, and tools--had to be left behind.

German posters proclaimed the new cultural order. "It's a privilege and an honor to be German," declared Metz's new ruler.

All that was French was to be swept away. Streets were renamed for prominent Nazis.

The expulsed ended up, for the most part, in the Midi--south central France. Many lived in poverty. Local inhabitants of the Midi provided shelter and support, and the Vichy government trumpeted its support in its own posters. This one shows well-fed children at the winter aid cantine of the Marshall (i.e., Maréchal Pétain.)

In the cities of the Midi, the expulsed tried to keep their culture and traditions alive. These advertisements in the Periguex newspaper, for a restaurant, a tailor, and a tavern, suggest to me that these cities must have had a "little Alsace and Lorraine," something like little Italy in New York City.

With the Allies' victory, the expulsed began to return home. Despite German assurances when they left the Moselle that their property would be protected, they soon found that everything had been systematically looted. This letter, to a man in exile in Casablanca, informs him that his tire-repair shop is now unoccupied but that it had been emptied of all of its contents in the first months of the German occupation.

In the immediate post-war, life was hard in France and especially in Alsace-Lorraine, which saw the worst of the fighting. The expulsed, who had lost almost everything when they left and found little when they returned, were among the worst off. They organized to claim their rights. Here's a poster calling for the expulsed and refugies to hold a big demonstration in Metz.

Contemporary Metz no longer has the street names imposed by the Nazis, but the story of the expulsed is still within the city's living memory. The exhibition "De gré ou de force, l'expulsion des Mosellans 1940-1945" runs through 31 May, 2011.

What's new, Metz?

2011-01-09T17:20:00.000-08:00

The biggest change in Metz since we left in June is that the refurbishment of the Place de la République, the city's largest public square, is complete. Indeed, the dedication ceremony took place the day before we arrived. The Pompidou Center-Metz continues to attract crowds; we met a group from Nîmes who had come up for a couple of days, with the new museum as the anchor site for their trip. The holiday lights on some of the streets have been updated, and the Christmas markets have expanded into the Place de la République itself, after having been pushed to the sidelines by the renovation. There were new exhibits at both the city and departmental archives. The cathedral's tower is still being renovated, with years to go, I think. The Saint Martin church near our apartment is now being renovated, too. Not surprisingly because we'd only been away since June, most of Metz seemed to be pretty much as we'd left it.

Because the holiday decorations are up and the Christmas market had started, I had the feeling of completing a cycle of seasons. These were nearly the sights that greeted Susie and me when we arrived for the first time in December of 2009. The sellers of patisseries displayed seasonal treats, like large chocolate figures of Saint Nicolas of Metz. They also displayed the usual, electrifying choice of cakes, pastries, cookies and other desserts, which seemed as vivid in real life as in my envious recollections back in El Paso.

Georgia Tech Lorraine continues to thrive. We missed the 20th-anniversary celebration, which brought in dignitaries from far and wide. We did have a chance to see my colleagues from the staff and to have dinner with some of my faculty colleagues. The students I'd taught had left for Atlanta, though. I still occasionally hear from some of them via e-mail, I'm glad to say.

A Return to Metz

2011-01-09T17:18:00.000-08:00

For a week, over Thanksgiving, Susie and I returned to Metz to see friends and to get a refresher of Lorraine cuisine. Over the next several posts, I'll explain what's new in Metz, tour an exposition on the Nazi expulsions of residents of the Moselle in World War II, note the commemoration of Metz's liberation 66 years ago, visit the Place de la Republique, tour St Julien-les-Metz, share a few details that caught my eye, and wrap up with some memories of the three communities in Metz with whom Susie and I are entwined.

Contrasts

2010-06-19T15:16:00.000-07:00

Rheims

Details

2010-06-18T16:09:00.000-07:00

Details of statues in Paris...

Faces on the Pont Neuf, allegedly caricatures of Henry II's advisors

Louvre frieze, along the Seine

Marguerite d'Anglouleme, Jardin du Luxembourg

Lion, fountain in front of St-Sulpice

Textures

2010-06-18T16:04:00.001-07:00

Rheims Synagogue

Textures

2010-06-18T16:02:00.000-07:00

Notre Dame de l'Epine

Towns in the Champagne Region

2010-06-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

On our way back from Rheims to Metz, to collect our luggage and head home to the USA, Susie and I visited two towns in the Champagne region, Chalons-en-Champagne and l'Epine.

Chalons-en-Champagne, with its twin rivers, the Mau and Nau, has a great deal of charm and a very helpful tourist office. The main square has sidewalk restaurants, half-timbered buildings, and a hotel that, as noted by a plaque, hosted Joan of Arc and her retinue. We ate a nice lunch at one of the restaurants.

The city's covered market looks like it's new, but the traditional vendors are still there in force. Note the fancy way the cauliflowers are displayed.

Chalons also has a nice synagogue. We didn't get to visit the interior, but the exterior is in the Moorish style that characterizes many of the synagogues of the region. Chalons's synagogue was designed by a local architect, Alexis Vagny, and built in 1874-1875 as part of the great wave of synagogue construction that followed the granting of full citizenship to French Jews by the Crémieux decrees of 1870. Chalons still has an active Jewish community, and the synagogue is in use.

A little further along the road toward Metz, we stopped at the village of l'Epine, whose chief claim to fame is its basilica, Notre Dame de l'Epine. This interesting church has a couple of notable contrasts. First, from afar, it looks huge, like the cathedral in Rheims. You can see the basilica from miles away, its towers standing tall on the horizon. Up close, it's more like a scaled-down version of a cathedral, with all the trappings but just smaller. Second, the basilica combines some of the most graceful and luminous Gothic architecture with other windows that are dark and heavy.

The town is named for a thorn bush, in which shepherds apparently found a statue of the Virgin Mary. Construction on the basilica started in 1406 and was completed around 1527. The basilica houses numerous works of religious art and notable 16th-Century pipe organ. The facade is ornate, but the rest of the church is simpler. The flying buttresses are particularly graceful and light; compare these buttresses to those the St-Remi basilica, for instance.

The interior is relatively simple, with a unity of style of that recalls churches of a century or two before the basilica's construction. Thus Notre Dame de l'Epine combines the lightness of late Gothic architecture with the simplicity of early Gothic.

Most of the basilica's stained glass was lost over the years. Here are the remnants of the original 16th-Century glass.

In contrast to the lightness of the nave, with great bright windows made possible by those elegant buttresses, the rose window of the west front harkens back to an early Gothic style, with solid and resolute stone framing that's centuries removed from the rose windows of, say, the cathedral and basilica in Rheims.

Textures

2010-06-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

Carnegie Library, Rheims

Art-Deco Details in Rheims

2010-06-15T22:46:00.001-07:00

Rheims, with its wealth of Art-Deco buildings, offers an overwhelming number of interesting architectural details. Here's a small sampling.

The first two are from houses.

The next is from the interior of a bakery.

This is a section of a frieze on the facade of the Carnegie Library.

The last two details come from the Opera cinema: one of series of stained-glass lights below the awning, and part of the facade's main frieze.

Saint-Remi Abbey and Basilica

2010-06-12T13:46:00.000-07:00

While the Rheims cathedral glorifies the spot at Clovis was baptised in 496, the basilica and abbey of Saint-Remi glorify the bishop who performed the baptism. Saint Remi, child of the Gallo-Roman elite and a noted scholar, was appointed Bishop of Rheims at the age of 22. He fostered close relations with Clovis, king of the Franks, who was busily conquering most of what would become the nation of France. Remi, with the support of Clovis's wife Clotilde, a Catholic Burgundian princess and subsequently named a saint, converted Clovis to Catholicism at the baptism commemorated by the Rheims cathedral.

The abbey of Saint-Remi was founded in the 6th Century. The abbey's current basilica was built in the 11th Century, and Saint Remi's relics were transfered to the basilica in 1099. Parts of the church were rebuilt and enlarged in the 12th through 15th Centuries. Further additions were made in the 17th and 19th Centuries. Remi's tomb still lies in the basilica's choir; the adjoining buildings of the abbey now house the St-Remi Museum, Rheim's museum of history and archeology.

The basilica, as it now stands, is an interesting amalgam of late Romanesque and early Gothic styles. The mixture is not as jarring as in the basilica at Dinan, where one side of the nave is Romanesque and the other side Gothic. But if you look, you can see the change of styles, for example, in the extension of the nave, where the two newest bays are Gothic.

While the basilica has some vertical elements, it retains the layers of horizontal solidity that characterize Romanesque architecture.

These sorts of tiers also characterize the basilica's facade.

In the choir, surrounding Saint-Remi's tomb, the multiple levels of arches and windows actually serve to make the space seem higher.

While much of the basilica's stained glass was destroyed in the two world wars, the windows were rebuilt with great care and taste. For instance, this transept rose window has traditional stained glass that brings jewel-toned light into the church.

Other windows have glass in more modern styles, but the glass serves to highlight the beauty of the windows' Gothic stonework. For example, this lower transept window is organic and flowing.
And this window, with its motif of birds (this relates to Saint-Remi, for reasons that are too incredible and arcane to warrrant explanation here), provides great illumination, verticality, and exuberance.

The other buildings of the abbey are adjacent to the basilica. Actually, it would be hard to be more adjacent, as the buildings are built right up against the basilica's north walls, in the spaces between the buttresses. The neoclassical style of the cloister is interrupted--sectioned--by the buttresses.

The upper-floor gallery along this side of the cloister show the arches of these flying buttresses.

The other sides of the cloister harmoniously and uniformly reflect the neoclassical classical style without interruption.

Some of the museum's rooms are really beautiful, such as this Gothic hall.

The museum tells the story of Rheims, starting with prehistory. It contains some remarkable Roman mosaics, including this enormous depiction of gladiators.

This 7th-Century necklace was made with pearls of amber and rounds of glass.

One of the museum's highlights is a set of medieval tapestries depicting the life of Saint-Remi. This panel, the right half of one of the tapestries, depicts Remi baptizing Clovis. The king, in the basin, is attended to by Remi, who wears a golden mitre.

The museum's main staircase is itself a work of art--symmetrical, light, ornate, and just plain huge.

Between the windows, on the far wall, hangs a portrait of Louis XV as a youth, wearing coronation robes. Indeed, he was crowned in the cathedral of Rheims so that he could rule with divine right, traced back to Clovis, conferred by Saint-Remi, for whom the abbey is named.

Textures

2010-06-12T13:43:00.001-07:00

Carnegie Library, Rheims

Rheims's Cathedral

2010-06-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

The cathedral of Rheims, Notre-Dame, is one of the four most famous cathedrals in France, along with those of Paris, Saint-Denis, and perhaps Chartres. Apart from its religious and architectural interest, Rheim's cathedral is noted for its involvement with the French monarchy, starting with the baptism of Clovis in 496, through the coronation of French kings for over a thousand years, ending with the coronation of Charles X in 1824.

The baptism of Clovis, in which the Frankish king Clovis converted to Christianity at the urging of his Catholic wife Clothilde after his victory at Tolbiac, stands as the point at which the country that became France first officially involved Catholicism. A stone in the center of the cathedral indicates the very spot of the baptism.

To cement their reigns with the memory of Clovis, French kings, beginning with Louis the Debonnaire in 816, staged their coronations in Rheims. Thus for most of the kings of France this cathedral became the opening of the reign, which would end with their burial at the Basilica of Saint-Denis. The cathedral itself was built in the 13th and 14th Centuries, replacing a church, which had replaced the basilica of Clovis's baptism, which in turn had been built on the site of Rheims's Roman baths.

The cathedral's facade has a strikingly consistent style, strongly vertical, and airy despite its mass. The cathedral was badly damaged in World War I. Restoration work began in 1919 and continues to this day.

If the cathedral influenced the French kings, these kings in turn have left their mark on the cathedral. In particular, above the great rose window, statues of French kings stand across the cathedral's facade, with, in the center, Clovis being baptised.

The facade also includes more fanciful figures, such at this gargoyle with the cast-metal head of cow.

The interior of the cathedral is about as stately as you can get, all vertical lines, with columns designed to look graceful rather than just solid, topped by Corinthian capitals.

The cathedral's design has a great unity, as can be seen in this view of the corner of the nave and the south transept.

The stained-glass windows are all modern, given the destruction wrought by German bombs in the war. Some of the windows have been rebuilt with traditional designs, such as for the great rose window of the facade. The restorers have done magnificent work here. The glass, in jewel tones, relates well to its Gothic stonework.

Other windows in the cathedral are resolutely modern. Marc Chagall created a set of windows for the north side of the choir. These windows seem more serene--and perhaps more sedate--than those at Metz. The windows include elements from both the Old and New Testaments. Here's a part of the windows that show Old Testament scenes.

Finally, other windows may be waiting for full-on restoration, but these windows have remarkably interesting stained-glass, in tones of white and gray. Here's a glimpse of one of these windows.

Back in the US

2010-06-12T12:37:00.001-07:00

Susie and I are back in the US of A, in the Continental Airlines President's Club in Houston, actually. The eleven-hour flight was actually pleasant, and I was able to get some work done on the plane.

I was expecting some degree of culture shock, but so far nothing to report. Maybe it's because, across the world, airports are such artificial environments that there's not much left to shock, culturally speaking.

As I wrote the other day, I'll continue to blog about our travels until I'm caught up. This will probably take a couple of weeks.

Contrasts

2010-06-11T07:06:00.001-07:00

Rheims

The Carnegie Library of Rheims

2010-06-11T06:20:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the First World War, American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie contributed funds for the construction of libraries in the three most-damaged cities of Europe. One of these libraries was given to Rheims. Building started in 1921 and was completed in 1927. From its inauguration in 1928 until all the way to 2003, it served as Rheim's main library.

The Carnegie Library of Rheims was, from its inception, a symbol of Franco-American relations. The President of the Republic and the U.S. Ambassador to France attended the library's inauguration. The building was designed by the Rheims architect Max Sainsaulieu in the Art Deco style that led the city's post-war reconstruction. From its exterior friezes to its interior elements, the building is Art Deco.

Sainsaulieu conceived of the building as a temple to knowledge. The main reading room is a high-ceilinged space with large windows and two stories of bookshelves. Although the room is not particularly large, it is luminous and warm.

The reading room's leaded windows are works of art...

...as is the stained-glass ceiling by Jacques Gruber.

The card-catalog room also boasts two levels.

The lobby is paneled in onyx, with inset mosaics. These mosaics, designed by Henri Sauvage, depict a variety of human intellectual and physical activities. Here is a sampling of these mosaics.

Rheims and Art Deco

2010-06-10T15:19:00.000-07:00

Eighty percent of Rheims was destroyed in the First World War, the worst loss of any of France's big cities. From this loss grew, at an incredible pace, a flowering of construction in 20th-Century styles, especially Art Deco. Reflecting the great destruction, 6,500 building permits were issued in Rheims between 1920 and 1930. The city held a competition among architects to plan its rebuilding. An American, G. B. Ford won. His plan led to opening up of public spaces, adding new public buildings, zoning for industry, and creating garden-city areas.

While Ford's plan specified some restrictions on building styles (e.g., no imitation Gothic buildings behind the cathedral), most of the city was open to architectural freedom and innovation. The 400 or so architects who designed Rheims's new buildings worked in a range of styles, from the Hausmann style of 19th-Century Paris to the "ocean-liner" style of large, moderne buildings. The style most often built, though, was Art Deco. The city's destruction and reconstruction turned Rheims into, effectively, the capital of Art Deco architecture. The Web site "Reims Ville Art Deco" provides comprehensive coverage.

Thanks to audioguides provided by the Rheims Tourist Office, Susie and I were able to take an Art-Deco walk through the city. Here are a few of the great Art-Deco buildings to which the tour took us.

This apartment building provided just about the purest representation of the Art Deco style of all the buildings we saw.

The ultra-modern addition to this Renaissance-style house was the project of the son of the house's owners.

The designer of this larger residential building managed to include references to Renaissance architecture, such as the oriel windows and the loggia, within a clearly Art-Deco style.

This smaller building, in the heart of the center of Rheims, includes a variety of Art-Deco features, such as abstract floral motifs, assymetry, a pergola, and simplified iron work.

Here's a view of a former bookstore, with its wonderful curves, lettering, and friezes.

On the eclectic side, this building is a garage for a residence on the street behind it.

For last, I've saved two of the most direct but opposite expressions of Art Deco. The first is the post office, which is modernist and built in concrete, but with lines and curves that make this building a sort of pure expression of Art-Deco principles.

The second is the facade of the Opera Cinema, a (former) movie palace. With its curves, friezes, ornements, gilding, and stained glass, this is about as far as you can get from the minimalist expression of the post office.

Rheims

2010-06-10T14:28:00.000-07:00

Susie and I spent two days in Rheims, which wasn't at all like I had expected. Rheims is famous above all for its cathedral, which was where the kings of France were crowned over a span of a thousand years. But the city is not another quaint assemblage of narrow medieval streets with half-timbered buildings. On the contrary, Rheims is a gracious city of broad esplanades lined with buildings from the 1920s and 30s.

This turns out to be for terrible reasons, but the result is a city that feels like a smaller, lower, and calmer version of Paris. Almost all of central Rheims was destroyed by German shelling in the First World War. The city had been evacuated, so few civilians lost their lives. But the destruction of Rheims's buildings was so complete that the city had to re-envision itself, replan itself, and rebuild itself. Over the course of the 1920s and early 1930s, often with reparation funds, the inhabitants rebuilt their city in a modern idiom, and primarily in the Art Deco style. Here's an example. I'll write blog post that takes readers on an abbreviated tour of some of Rheims's Art Deco buildings.

The cathedral was badly damaged in World War I, as well. It's been rebuilt and restored--indeed, restoration work continues to this day. I'll write another blog post with details on the cathedral and its history.

One of the few buildings to survive World War I largely unscathed (its facade, anyway) was the Grand Theatre, a neo-Classical structure from the Belle Epoque. The auditorium and stage had to be rebuilt after the war. The auditorium is rather intimate compared to some opera houses. It has a glass ceiling surrounded by elegant paintings that must be from the 1920s. Susie and I were able to attend a terrific performance of Rossini's "La Cenerentola." Rossini based his opera on the story of Cinderella, and this staging--a co-production with Spoleto USA and Avignon--certainly lived up to the promise of the magic in Cinderella's tale. The singing was superb, the sets (including computer effects!) excellent, the staging imaginative and funny, and the orchestra sparkling.

One of the best buildings in Rheims is a Carnegie Library, an Art Deco masterpiece from the 1920s. I hope to be able to blog about this building in detail.

Many of the streets in central Rheims are reserved for pedestrians. With a carousel, fountains, monuments, and those Art Deco buildings, these streets bring a charm and liveliness to the city.

And if your feet get tired from walking to see all those buildings, or if you're meeting friends for drinks or dinner, the broad pedestrian avenues of Rheims offer many restaurants, cafes, and bars from which you can choose.

Nearly on Our Way Home

2010-06-10T14:17:00.001-07:00

Our plane leaves from Paris on Saturday morning, so we're starting our way home on Friday. It's been a great few months, full of professional growth thanks to Georgia Tech-Lorraine, of satisfaction of teaching thanks to the students here, of discovering and learning about Metz and Lorraine, and of exploring much of northern France.

Susie and I have spent the last two days here in Metz, repacking and saying goodbyes. As you can tell from the blog postings over the last few days, we had worked our way east from Brittany. We spent two nights in Rouen and two nights in Rheims. I was able to post the blog entries for Rouen, and I hope to get some of the blog entries on Rheims posted before we leave. However, that will still leave a lot left unblogged, and I'm planning to post these items after we get back to El Paso. The remaining material includes villages in the Champagne region, our trip to Malta for the LREC 2010 conference, our visit here in Metz to the Robert Schumann museum (the father of the European Union, not the composer), more details of Paris, much more on Rheims, and some reflections on contrasts of daily life in Metz and El Paso.

So please check back over the course of the next few weeks for these postings.

Contrasts

2010-06-10T04:53:00.001-07:00

Rouen

Rouen's Musée des Beaux Arts

2010-06-10T03:13:00.000-07:00

As Susie blogged the other d ay, we visited the Musée des Beaux Arts of Rouen--in two stints, actually. With our first visit, we saw the new exhibition "A City for Impressionism: Monet, Pissarro and Gaugin in Rouen." The museum didn't permit photos of the exhibition, but I'll try to describe some of the highlights. In the late 19th Century Rouen was only about 2 hours from Paris by train, so it served as a convenient escape for Impressionist artists, especially those interested in plein-air painting. Rouen also had several city natives who played significant roles in the development of Impressionism; collectively they were known as, naturally, the Rouen School.

The exhibition covers paintings of Rouen by pre-Impressionists such as Turner and Corot, landscapes of the Seine as a transition from traditional to modern painting, early visits to Rouen by Pissarro, early (1884) works in and of Rouen by Gaugin when he first turned full-time to painting, the start of the Rouen School with its "Three Musketeers," Monet's famous series of paintings of the Rouen cathedral, Pissaro's response (in 1896 and 1898) with his great series of landscapes of Rouen's industrial docksides, related Impressionist paintings of Rouen's many churches, the paintings of the Rouen School through the turn of the 20th Century, and the subsequent development of painting in Rouen into post-Impressionism.

The works in the exhibition come from not only the Musée des Beaux Arts itself but also from private collections and from museums around the world, including many museums from the United States. The exhibition's clear highlights are the Monet cathedrals and the Pissaro industrial landscapes. In his stays in Rouen, Monet painted a total of 30 views of the cathedral, showing the cathedral at different times of day and in different weather. He would have multiple canvases in progress, moving from painting to painting as the light changed. And of these 30 paintings, an amazing 10 are grouped together in a single room in this exhibition. The Pissaro paintings are less famous, and perhaps less radical, but they reflect Pissarro's taking up Monet's initiative by painting the same view of the river and the adjacent industrial area in different light and in different weather. At the time, Pissarro suffered from acute conjuntivitis, was confined to his hotel, and thus painting what he could see from the hotel's window. These paintings, with their smokestacks and smoke, ships and sailors, and light and weather are truly masterworks.

In the afternoon, we returned to the museum to view its permanent collection, which is also outstanding. And, in addition to the collections, the museum itself is interesting. The museum's central atrium, from which visitors make their way into the exhibitions, is a luminous courtyard filled with large works.

Even the stairwells are works of art, in this case by Felice Varini, whose "Five Ellipses" was installed in the Place des Armes in Metz (and now has been removed after the opening of Metz's Pompidou Center). Varini's works in the stairwells consist of elements of circles, painted on the walls and ceiling, that are visible as circles only in convex mirrors affixed at the top of the stairwells. Some of Varini's work pays explicit homage to the work of Marcel Duchamp, who grew up and began his career in Rouen, and who is well-represented in the museum. Among Duchamp's creations exhibited here are three experiments in using a phonograph turntable to create kinetic art. Here's one of these "Studies of Rotating Discs."

The esplanade in front of the Museum is named for Duchamp. In France, signs for streets named after persons typically have the person's dates and a capsule biography, such as "French patriot" or "Mayor of Rouen." With Duchamp, in keeping with his iconoclastic outlook, the city has had fun with the street signs for the esplanade, which include varied descriptions of Duchamp such as "engineer of lost time" and "Anartist."

The works of Monet and Pissarro are also represented in the museum's permanent collection. Although they don't relate to the theme of the exhibition, I wanted to include at least a couple of these paintings to provide something of the exhibition's flavor. Monet painted this field of flowers near Giverny in 1885.

And Pissarro painted this view of Paris's Tuileries gardens, with snow effect, in 1900.

The museum also includes many works of the 18th and 19th Centuries, ranging from "Orientalist" paintings of Arabia to monumental religious paintings.

I especially enjoyed one painting in particular--a view of the interior of the Rouen museum in 1880, by the Rouenais painter Charles Angrand, who could be thought of as the "fourth musketeer." The coolest thing about this painting is it is displayed in the room in which it was painted, with some of the paintings it shows, such as Boulanger's 1827 "Le supplice de Mazzepa," a kind of disturbing work, actually, that made Boulanger famous.

Textures

2010-06-08T15:48:00.001-07:00

Mont Saint-Michel

Rouen's Palais de Justice

2010-06-08T15:12:00.000-07:00

One of the great buildings in Rouen is the Palais de Justice. Built in 1508-1509, it originally served as the exchequer and then the meeting place for the Norman parliament. The palais was badly damaged in World War II but restored masterfully.

Recent construction led to the discovery of 12th-Century Jewish ruins beneath the palais's right staircase in the main courtyard. These ruins may be the oldest Yeshiva in all of France. Visits are limited, though, and I understand that the waiting list already runs through August.

Regardless of the attraction of ruins underneath, the palais's Gothic exterior draws the eye in many ways. There are dozens of gargoyles, running along all of the exterior walls.

Most of these are, of course, restorations, but the stonemasons who carved them have clearly expressed the medieval sense of humor and wildness. So here are a few of the gargoyles.

Finally, it's not a gargoyle as such, but this little dragon, looking peevishly over its shoulder, caught my eye.

Rouen's Churches

2010-06-07T13:26:00.000-07:00

Rouen's nickname is the city of a hundred steeples. Indeed, churches and towers seem to be around every corner, sometimes side-by-side. The city's two biggest churches are its cathedral and a former abbey church, which, although both high Gothic, present an interesting contrast.

The cathedral, Notre-Dame de Roue n, draws its fame not only from its own attributes but perhaps even more so from the Monet's celebrated series of paintings showing the cathedral's facade in different weather and at different times of day. But the cathedral is so original, so compelling that its facade, even with its familiarity and even with its lower part covered for restoration, leads you to ask "Is that really the Monet cathedral?"

Ironically, at least to me, this cathedral, so famous for its role in seeing light in its various characters, on the inside appears sort of gloomy. The cathedral, constructed from the 12th to the 16th Centuries, is vast, and its interior has the powerful vertical lines of high Gothic.

But for a Gothic church with flying buttresses, the overall effect inside seems dark.

In part this may be due to the lack of windows at the gallery level above the main arches of the nave and below the upper windows.

Like many French churches, the cathedral lost much of its original stained glass during the Second World War. The cathedral's great rose window is in white glass, which makes the stonework all the more remarkable and adds some additional light to the nave.

The cathedral does have some beautiful stained glass. Here's a section of one of the windows in the choir.

The cathedral has many interesting elements. During the restoration of the facade, some of the statues have been brought into the cathedral. Here's the statue of King David, here recognized, by his holding a harp, as the psalmist.

And the north transept has this terrific Renaissance staircase, although it looks to me like the upper flight now doesn't actually go anywhere.

The church of Saint-Ouen, although perhaps less famous than the cathedral, is more harmonious and more luminous. It was originally the abbey church for the Benedictine Order. Construction began in 1318 and was completed in the 15th Century. Even under its exterior grime, the abbey's facade is highly symmetric.

Saint-Ouen's flying buttresses, although seemingly similar to the those of the cathedral, for some reason are able to support walls that let in a great deal more light.

Thus, in contrast to the cathedral, Saint-Ouen's gallery is lit by enormous windows.

Thus in the choir, as in the nave, Saint-Ouen is warm and luminous, while still showing off its impressive height.

Above the arches, the choir still shows some elements of painted decoration.

Like the cathedral, Saint-Ouen is big. Those pillars are huge!

Saint-Ouen's stained glass is breathtaking. Here are the windows in the north transept.

The colors of the glass in the windows of the nave in turn color other parts of Saint-Ouen. Here is the play of light on part of the floor of the north aisle of the nave.

And, saving the best for last, here is the great rose window of the facade, with its modern glass framed by flamboyant forms.

Textures

2010-06-07T13:24:00.001-07:00

Utah Beach, Normandy

Rouen

2010-06-07T13:02:00.000-07:00

Capital of Haute-Normandie, Rouen sits bestride the Seine between Paris and the English Channel. Although Le Havre, at the Seine's mouth, developed into northern France's deep-water port, Rouen had been a port city for centuries. The city's right bank, with the cathedral and commercial districts, was a center for social life. The left bank, with its great factories born of the Industrial Revolution, provided the economic foundation for the city's growth in the 18th and 19th Centuries. In the late 19th Century, Rouen's cathedral served as the subject of Monet's iconic series of paintings about light and its changes. Rouen's bridges of that era, forever in our imaginations through the paintings of other Impressionists such as Pissarro, were all destroyed in the Second World War. Modern bridges now span the river.

On both sides of Rouen, the Seine makes a series of great loops, carving the hillsides on the outsides of the bends. Looking east from central Rouen, you can see how surprising hilly this part of Normandy turns out to be.

Although the great sailing and steamships of the heyday of Rouen's port left many, many years ago, the port still serves traffic, both touristic and commercial. A large cruise boat, presumably down from Paris, was docked near the center of the city. Passengers were having drinks on the upper deck as we walked by. And many barge were docked east of the city center. The two bigger barges in this photo carry, improbably enough, the respective names of "Harlem" and "Bronx."

The center of Rouen has preserved much of its medieval character.
It's easy to walk in--and not so easy to drive in--because many of the streets are reserved for pedestrians. This lets sidewalk cafes spill out into the the street.

We had dinner in a slight space in the bend of a street, under an ancient stone wall, where the tables were set up across from a tavern. Little kids on bicycles rolled by. The jazz musicians playing inside the tavern occasionally came out to play a little and to pass the hat. Darkness came so late that the restaurant didn't bring out the candles until 10:20 p.m.

Rouen suffered great damage in World War II, so many structures have been rebuilt or replaced. This has led to odd juxtapositions, such as on the Rue aux Juifs, where the laboriously restored, ornate Palais de Justice sits next to and opposite cleanly drawn post-war buildings.

Even with all the damage, Rouen retains many wonderful spaces, such as this little passage.

And in numerous half-timbered buildings you begin to get the impression that medieval builders had a variety of ideas about what constitutes straight.

The Tourist Office, opposite the cathedral, occupies a resplendent Renaissance mansion, the oldest in Rouen.

Over a street parallel to the Rue aux Juifs, the Gros Horloge (big clock) has been keeping time since the late 14th Century; the current clock and clock faces date from the 1520s.

In French history, Rouen's tragic link was to serve as the place of the trial and burning of Joan of Arc at the hands of the English. Joan of Arc, whom ultra-rightist elements have of late tried to appropriate as their symbol, still remains Saint Joan, a figure of reverence here. At the Place Jeanne d'Arc, a modern church, with its roof in the form of what I see as a helmet and abutting the newly rebuilt market, was built in her name.

The site of her burning, in the old market square, is marked with flowers and a monument. Twenty-four years later, as marked by a plaque on the Palais de Justice, a later ecclesiastical court found her innocent, which didn't do much for Joan herself by that point.

And across from the church, around the square, restaurants, cafes and bars have taken hold, providing a night life much cheerier than the awful events of 1431.

Traces of Norman History

2010-06-06T14:58:00.000-07:00

Susie and I visited two sites in Normandy that preserve the evidence and meaning of the history of Normandy: the Scriptorial in Avranches, and the Tapestry Museum in Bayeux.

The Scriptorial conserves all of, and displays a selection of, the surviving manuscripts and books from Mont Saint-Michel. While the monks of Mont Saint Michel evidently did not produce much in the way of original writings, they collected and copied many works, many of which were essential to their religious life. The Scriptorium is housed in a new, specially designed building that was constructed through integration into Avranches's medieval fortifications.

As you wend your way up ramped exhibits, you learn about the provenance, creation, maintenance and history surrounding the documents conserved in the museum. There's a lot of hands-on material. Eventually you reach the "treasure"--the display of a dozen or so of the documents, in a low-light, climate-controlled room. Every three months the museum changes some of the documents displayed.

The earliest documents, two sheets of parchment in an open Carolingian hand, date from the 9th Century.

The Scriptorial's treasure also displayed some beautiful illuminated works, including this book of Gregorian chants, which was created in the 13th Century.

We also were able to view this illuminated manuscript with gold leaf and brilliant colors.

In Bayeux, we visited the museum that displays the Bayeux Tapestry. I'd seen the tapestry in 1967-68, in the old viewing room, in which the tapestry was displayed around the walls of a large, well-lit room. In the early 1980s the display of the tapestry was changed to a long, light-controlled case that wraps around an interior wall, and this is how we saw the tapestry on our visit. Needless to say, the museum does not permit photos, but there are lots of resources on the Web for information about the tapestry.

In brief, the Bayeux Tapestry is an extended embroidery (rather than a woven tapestry), probably created around 1170, that recounts the history of the Norman Conquest. William, who had won the crown of England in 1066 after defeating King Harold at Hastings, faced a population and nobility who were likely not predisposed to like him as their sovereign. Thus the tapestry serves to present the story of the conquest from the Norman perspective; it is likely a sort of early Medieval propaganda presented in the form we would recognize today as Classic Comics.

The tapestry's connection to Bayeux, which even today is is a picturesque city with Medieval elements, is not haphazard at all. Rather, William's half-brother Odo, who fought at his side in the Battle of Hastings, was the Bishop of Bayeux. Thus the tapestry's presence in Bayeux, like size and grandeur of Bayeux's cathedral, which housed the tapestry, reflects the city's prestige and importance. Actually, it's amazing that the tapestry survived to our era. The museum recounts the tapestry's history, which includes being saved from use as packing material.

Seeing the tapestry in the museum is aided by a audio-guide. The interesting commentary helps visitors understand the tapestry's origins, craft and meaning. The audio, though, is a little rushed, moving you quickly from panel to panel. It's true that you can pause the audio whenever you like, but I would have preferred the option to get more in-depth information about panels, and even the border, at many points along my viewing of the tapestry. At the museum boutique Susie and I bought a book that collected papers from a recent symposium dedicated to the tapestry, and I'm hoping that it will answer many of my questions.

The D-Day Beaches

2010-06-06T01:54:00.001-07:00

As I write, it's now June 6, the anniversary of D-Day. Susie and I visited the Normandy American Cemetery and the D-Day beaches yesterday. Here are a few impressions and images.

The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial lies on slightly sloping ground just above Omaha Beach. The Americans who died on this beach are buried right next to sands on which they fought.

In all, more than 9,300 Americans are buried here, most of whom were killed in the landings and subsequent operations.

Because the anniversary of D-Day would be marked the next day, the cemetery had many visitors, of many different nationalities.

A new Visitors' Center presents the inspiring and moving story of D-Day and the men and women who began the liberation of Europe from Nazi Germany. With images, text, displays, and video, the exhibits help you appreciate the circumstances, heroism and sacrifices of the 150,000 people who carried out the D-Day invasion.

Omaha Beach, below the sandy cliffs of what is now the cemetery, proved to be an arduous and deadly place for the soldiers who landed there. Despite bitter fighting and heavy casualties, by the end of D-Day the U.S. 1st Division had scaled the cliffs and taken the high ground on which the cemetery stands.

Utah Beach, the location of the second American attack, was still deadly--German bunkers lay behind the dunes--but not as treacherous as Omaha Beach. The U.S. 4th Division quickly took the beach and pushed inland.

The first village in France to be liberated by the Allies was Sainte Marie du Mont, a few kilometers from Utah Beach. When we visited Saint-Marie-du-Mont yesterday, the center of the village around the church had been transformed into a recreation of D-Day just after the village's liberation. We saw sandbags, tents, jeeps, parachutes, soldiers and nurses everywhere.

It turns out that this was part of a large-scale recreation of D-Day, with military role-playing enthusiasts from all over western Europe taking part. We chatted with a man from Belgium, wearing an American army uniform from World War II, who had come to Sainte Marie du Mont for this recreation.

A command post, complete with period typewriters, occupied the courtyard of a building opposite the church. A Frenchman, also in an American uniform, crouching behind the improvised desk, told us that this spot was, in fact, where the Americans had set up their command post.

All kinds of activities were taking place around the church, ranging from serving food and drink from an army-style tent to an educational program for children, a dozen or so of whom, all dressed in camouflage, were seated on benches in a tent.

There were army jeeps everywhere. When we first saw these, on our way to the Normandy American Cemetery, we did a double-take. But then they kept coming. We think that people could rent these. So there were jeeps taking part in the D-Day recreation and other jeeps with people, some in uniform, who were just sight-seeing. We also saw larger trucks, many motorcycles, and a half-track.

From Sainte Marie du Mont we drove over to Sainte Mère-Eglise, which was the setting for some of D-Day's most dramatic moments. We ended up not seeing much of the village because, as we got there, our car ended up in a traffic jam caused by the start of a memorial parade. Cars were parked everywhere, crowds lined the streets, and police officers were directing traffic. After 20 minutes of bumper-to-bumper crawl, we were waved through a gap in the parade's line of cars and managed to escape the mess. From the car, as we passed, we did spot the church on which the American parachutists got stuck, but we'll come back some other, less harried day to visit Sainte Mère-Eglise.

Even from our brief visit to these two villages, it's clear that the American liberation of this area forms an important part of both their history and their present. The main street of Sainte Marie du Mont is named for the U.S. 101st Airborne, and the roads near Utah Beach are named for U.S. service personnel. At Utah Beach, among the American monuments to the soldiers, engineers, and others who began the liberation of France and Europe, there is a memorial from the village of Sainte Marie du Mont recognizing their liberators of June 6, 1944.

Mont Saint-Michel

2010-06-04T13:31:00.000-07:00

Le Mont Saint-Michel, probably France's most famous abbey, rises improbably from a small, rocky island, now connected to land by a causeway. The island is similar geologically to the Mont Dol, just in the bay rather than on land. Mont Saint-Michel's first church was built by Aubert, Bishop of Avranches in 709. Benedictine monks began living on the island in 966, and a larger church was built before the end of the millenium. This was replaced in the 11th Century by a Romanesque church, which was, over the course of subsequent centuries, extended, enlarged, and fortified, with the later additions in the Gothic style. A bustling pilgrimage point during the Middle Ages, after the French Revolution the Abbey was turned into a prison. Dilapidated and unused, the abbey was was declared a historic monument in 1874. Restored in the late 19th Century, the abbey and its island have regained their status as an icon of France.

The causeway connecting Mont Saint-Michel and the mainland serves as both road and parking lot. Over the years, the causeway has amplified the silting of the bay; the government plans to replace the causeway with a bridge, so that the bay's waters, driven by the tides, can flow more freely and return Mont Saint-Michel to being an island rather than a peninsula.

From the abbey's windows, you can look out at the coast as it encroaches on the island.

From the island's ramparts, you can look out into the bay, which divides Brittany from Normandy.

Crossing through the ramparts at the island's main gate, you soon start climbing up the main street, which has commerce and bustle that recall the street as pilgrims must have found it in the Middle Ages. Hotels, restaurants, various museums, and souvenir shops clamor for the tourist's attention.

The abbey was built at the island's summit. Its central part is supported by the rock, and its outer parts are supported by foundations that have been built up around the rock. The whole point of the edifice is to reach toward the heavens. Of course, this means that visitors, like the pilgrims before them, have to climb a long ways to reach the abbey.

After reaching the top of the street, you climb flights of stairs outside the abbey.

Inside the abbey's walls, you climb more flights of stairs.

And then you wind between the abbot's residence and the foundations of the abbey itself, rising from the island's rock.

The abbey was built of granite brought by boat from the Cha usey Islands. That must have been the easy part, compared to getting all that rock up the mountain.

When the abbey was converted to a prison, a hauling system was installed. This involved a buttress that served as a track for a heavy wooden sledge, which was raised up the track by a large wheel in which five or six prisoners would walk, as if they were in a large hampster-wheel.

The 19th-Century sledge is no longer used. To its left is a modern cable-car system, which during our visit this was being used to lift supplies for a meeting of personnel of a major French bank.

Visitors to the abbey, alas, are not hauled up on cable-cars. But when, after all that climbing, you reach the top, you get to see one of the masterpieces of religious architecture. The facade is actually more recent than the rest of the abbey. Part of the nave had been removed, and this Romanesque revival front then enclosed the remaining part of the nave. You can see the outlines of the old nave in the raised stone of the platform.

Inside the abbey, you walk through the Romanesque nave, with the Gothic choir ahead of you. In the Middle Ages, this now-sober space would have been much more colorful, with painted walls, tapestries, devotional objects, and so forth.

The choir is unusually light, especially with the morning sun streaming in from the east.

Of course, looking light doesn't make it light. On the level below, the choir is supported by massive, closely set pillars.

I mentioned that parts of the edifice other than the center of the abbey were built up on foundations surrounding the central rock. The most striking part of this is the Merveille, the marvel, which contained the living quarters for the monks. The three stories of the Merveille, which was built up on the north side of the abbey, were constructed in a mere 25 years.

At the top floor of the Merveille, alongside the nave, you find the cloister, which is itself a marvel of Gothic grace, with its twin rows of slender offset columns. In her blog posting about Mont Saint-Michel, Susie included photos of some of the wonderful spandrels above the columns' capitals.

Next to the cloister, also atop the Merveille, is the refectory, whose many tall windows, seen here from the outside, bring in a great diffuse light.

From the inside of the refectory, the windows' deep insets make it so that you see only a few of the windows directly; the rest of the windows light the room, unseen. This produces an overall effect that combines solidity, grace, warmth, and light.

The abbey also has spaces with much less grace but still with interest. Its development over the years, with different styles, designers, and needs, led to odd, left-over and service spaces, such as this little courtyard that recalls M.C. Escher.

The abbey also has elements of unexpected charm, such as this wall along the west side.

As you leave the abbey to return to the city below, you pass through the abbey's gardens, on the north side, near the foundations of the Merveille. The gardens, with their plantings and walks overlooking the bay, provide some moments of serenity before you dive back into the street and its crowds.

Dinan

2010-06-04T11:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Susie blogged about the Breton city of Dinan. Here's a little more on Dinan from my perspective. Dinan, despite being miles inland, is a port city. It lies on the Rance at the point where the river is no longer tidal. The city retains much of its ramparts, along which visitors can walk.

From the ramparts you can look down into the valley of the Rance and the port of Dinan.

The old center of the city has a lot of medieval charm, with half-timbers and corbels.

Medieval Dinan has many buildings with arcades, where merchants would display their wares.

For many years, the Tour de l'Horloge, a 15th-Century tower, served first as a look-out tower for fires in the city, then at the start of the 16th Century as bell and clock tower, and the city's administration and archives. The tower was Dinan's town hall until the French Revolution.

Climbing to the top takes 158 steps, of three different kinds. The first steps are on a circular stone staircase.

Then you go up successive flights of wooden stairs that circle the inside of the tower.

As you near the top, a sign warns you that the bells ring the hour and quarter-hours. And from the top of the wooden stairs you climb what is essentially a ladder to the rooftop. Getting out on the roof is itself an adventure, as there's not much onto which to hold as you transition from the ladder. The roof, which goes around the spire, is narrow, and the railing is not as high as you might prefer.

Sticking to the inside of the rooftop, I took pictures of the wonderful panorama of Dinan and its surrounding countryside. Here's a picture of the Sant-Sauveur basilica, which turns out to be a truly interesting building.

The exterior of the basilica provides some clues as to its peculiarity. The facade's doors are Romanesque but the windows are flamboyant Gothic. The porch on the right side is Gothic, but (and you can't tell this from the photo), the rest of that side of the basilica is Romanesque.

And, sure enough, when you enter the basilica, you find that entire right side of the nave is Romanesque and the entire left side is Gothic.

Dol and Mont Dol

2010-06-03T13:37:00.000-07:00

From the flat Breton countryside southwest of the Mont Saint Michel rises le Mont Dol, a rocky outrcropping that, in its form, is a small mountain. Mont Dol's summit provides outstanding views and supports a number of interesting structures, including a windmill. Also on the summit, with the Baie Saint-Michel as its distant backdrop, stands a small chapel, Notre-Dame-de-l'Espérance.

This rustic chapel dates from the first half of the 19th Century. It's the remaining part of an older, larger chapel, dedicated to Saint Michael, that itself had been erected on the site of a pagan temple. The views beyond the chapel toward the bay are beautiful, although on the day we visited Mont Dol there was haze that left the Mont Saint-Michel barely visible on the horizon (and visible in this picture only as a slight smudge at the left edge).

The summit of Mont Dol afforded a much clearer view of the cathedral of the nearby village of Dol-de-Bretagne. The cathedral is a surprisingly large church for a town of this size, reflecting its medieval status as the seat of a bishop.

The village of Dol has a charming old center that provides an enjoyable stroll.

The stroll brings you to Dol's cathedral, named for Saint Samson, a monk from Cardiff who, in 548, founded a monastery in Dol. The present Gothic cathedral dates from the mid-13th Century, mostly. Lack of funds left the Gothic towers of the fairly simple facade unfinished.

The cathedral's interior is more elaborate. Even though it's a large building, it has a sense of lightness. The tracery in front of the upper-floor galleries helps to break up the massiveness, and the slender arches draw your eyes upward. If the exterior is sober, the interior can be rightfully termed flamboyant.

Le Musée de Bretagne

2010-06-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

Le Musée de Bretagne, a wonderful museum in Rennes that reopened in new quarters in 2006, helps visitors learn about Breton peoples and cultures. I say peoples and cultures because the Breton peninsula has been home to several different groups, including pre-Celtic neolithic peoples, the Celtic Gauls, Romans and Romanized Gauls, and Britons, who, fleeing the Anglo-Saxon and Scots invaders starting in the late 4th Century, settled here and gave the area its name, Brittany, and a language, Breton. While the Britons/Bretons primarily settled in the west of Brittany, the east remained primarily Gaulish Gallo-Roman, with its own language, Gallo, a Romance language. To this day, the Breton/Gallo distinction is still reflected in the division of the Basse-Bretagne and Haute-Bretagne departments.

The museum is housed in an exciting building, called Les Champs Libres, that also contains a science museum, planatarium, and library. From the building's second floor (counting like Americans where the first floor is the ground floor), you can see the library's walls rising within the building.

The museum's permanent expositions are well-done, with lots of interactive and audio-visual exhibits. I can't really show you the interactive aspects here, but I thought I would at least show a few of the items on pre-Roman Brittany that caught my eye. These pottery pieces from the early neolithic age, about 6,700 years ago, were found in the nearby village of Saint-Etienne-en-Coglès. Note the decorative elements on pieces probably intended for storage.

The Gauls, before the arrival of the Roman Legion, maintained a culture with thriving trade. They minted coins, such as those seen here.

The Gauls' trade meant that they exported some materials and imported others. This marvelous bowl of the 1st or 2nd Century CE, with its designs in relief, came from Rome.

The museum also helps visitors understand the living cultural heritage of all these influences. One particularly interesting exhibit was a video showing speakers of Gaelic, Breton, Manx, and Gallo. The speaker of Breton discussed how she was raising her child to speak Breton.

Of Tides and Boats

2010-06-02T13:08:00.000-07:00

The bay surrounding the Mont Saint-Michel has the highest tides of Europe. The tides move so fast that Victor Hugo wrote that the waters come in at the speed of a galloping horse. In fact, the entire north coast of Brittany is famous for its great range between low and high. This means that, as the waters recede, a lot of boats end up lying there on the floor of the harbor. In visiting the Emerald Coast, I saw a number of approaches to dealing with the problem of tides for boats.

One way to deal with low tide, and I would say the most prevalent, is simply to let your boat come to rest on its side.

If you're antsy about having your boat lie on its side on the harbor bottom, you can provide supports on each side of the boat that hold the boat upright as the tide goes out.

An even easier way to do this is to have a boat with twin keels that, with the rudder, form a tripod that keeps the boat vertical. I'd read about this, but I'd never actually seen this before. The twin keels aren't as effective for sailing as a single keel, but if you moored your boat in a big-tide area you might well choose this solution.

What else could you do? Instead of twin keels, how about twin hulls? This boat was docked at--and then below--the jetty at la Houle, Cancale's main harbor.

And for a truly radical approach to dealing with the tides, consider this truck rolling on the beach at La Houle.

Just drive into the water...

... and motor away into the bay!

The Emerald Coast

2010-06-01T13:33:00.000-07:00

Brittany's Emerald Coast, la Côte Emeraude, stretches west to east from Cap Frehel to Cancale, with the Rance estuary cities of Dinard and St-Malo along the way. It covers wild shores, resorts, fishing villages, lighthouses, mansions, and forts. A formal "community of communes" groups nine villages in the center of the coast.

Cap Fréhel, a dramatic point jutting into the Gulf of St-Malo, for centuries has guides mariners with its lighthouse. The first lighthouse, built of granite and erected under Louis XIV, burned coal and then fish oil. The present lighthouse, erected in 1950, is one of the five most powerful lighthouses in France.

The rocks of the Cap Fréhel rise some 200 feet above the ocean.

The steep cliffs don't have fences or guard-rails along their edges. The people standing on the edge of the cliff in this photo provide an idea of the size and immediacy of the drop.

Parts of the cliffs, especially some free-standing pillars, shelter sea birds. I saw a cormorant feeding its young.

Looking east from Cap Fréhel, you can see the rocky, jutting points that that characterize the Emerald Coast.

At the end of one of the points stands the Fort de la Latte, built in the 14th Century and reworked in the 17th Century. Gaps in the supporting rocks serve as natural moats.

Other interesting buildings stand all along the Emerald Coast, such as this, uh, discreet little structure.

Very nice houses in the Breton style have been built along the shore.

The well-to-do in earlier times tended to build slightly inland. People a couple of hundred years ago who gained wealth from fishing built mansions called malouines. This malouine, near Saint-Coulomb, is called la Motte aux Chauffe.

Of course, people still earn their livings from the sea and shore. These structures near St-Jacut-de-la-Mer are posts for the cultivation of mussels.

In the same area, people also take to the sea for sport, such as kite-surfing.

Crossing the estuary of Rance, passing through Dinard and Saint-Malo, and continuing east in the direction of Cancale, you reach less developed, non-resort areas such as the beach of the Anse du Guesclin, just north of Saint-Coulomb.

Simpler, more rustic structures stand above the rocks and waves, such as this old customs house. A hermit lived here for several years, up to the winter of 2003.

Just off the east end of the beach, on a rock separated from the land by the waters of high tides, stands the Fort du Guesclin. The first fort on this site was built in 1160. The present fort dates from 1758; it was built to defend the coast against attacks by the English.

Continuing east, you'll reach the Pointe de Grouin, which separates the Gulf of Saint-Malo from the Baie Saint-Michel.

In the distance, past the rocks, past the lighthouse, on the edge of the horizon, you can make out the distant coast of Normandy.

And as you near Cancale, looking southeast into the bay, you can see the silhouette of the Mont Saint-Michel, rising from the tidal flats like an aquatic mirage.

Textures

2010-06-01T02:14:00.001-07:00

Cancale

Brittany and Cancale

2010-05-31T13:53:00.000-07:00

Susie and I arrived in Brittany on Saturday afternoon. We're staying in a gite outside the village of Saint-Coulomb, which is about half way between Saint-Malo, the celebrated resort city and port, and Cancale, a smaller city on the Bay of Saint-Michel that is famous for its oysters. Saint-Malo struck us as big, busy, and touristy. Cancale, although it has its own tourists, feels more of like a working city.

We've spent a couple of days visiting Cancale, even taking in an English-language showing of "Greenberg" at the city's municipal movie-theater; we were two out of a total of six customers. Perhaps a theme of unbalanced and angry New Yorkers in self-centered Los Angeles does not draw them in, here.

Like most of the cities and villages in Brittany that we've been able to see so far, Cancale is largely built of stone, especially granite. Cancale's church and sober houses crowd on the heights above the shore.

Oysters, their cultivation, and their harvesting play such an important role in Cancale that the city's main square, in front of the church, has a statue/fountain of women washing oysters in baskets. The people of Cancale have made their living from oysters for many years. There's a painting by John Singer Sargent that shows the oyster gatherers of Cancale in 1875. At restaurants along the coast of Brittany, the menus advertise "huitres de Cancale." I came across a report, though, that although some Cancale oysters are still the indigenous delicate oyster of Brittany, these are disappearing and have been largely replaced by a faster-growing breed from Japan. Restaurant menus distinguish these as, respectively, plattes and creuses.

You can buy oysters, along with other seafood, at Cancale's weekly market, held on Sunday mornings in the streets behind the church.

Or you can buy oysters from the sellers whose stands line the quay right where the oysters are cultivated and gathered. As compared to oysters sold in restaurants, these oysters are sold at miracle prices. As attested by the piles of oyster shells and lemon rinds below the quay, many are eaten on the spot.

Cancale's oyster beds, acres and acres of them, lie right next to the city. As the tide starts to go out, the oyster beds begin to emerge from the water.

And when the tide is low, you can begin to see the extent of the oyster beds.

The oyster gatherers head into the beds, using tractors to haul the oysters back to shore near the city's port area of La Houle.

La Houle lies on the other side of the jetty from the oyster beds. It looks over moorage for commercial and pleasure boats, most of which end up beached at low tide.

The waterfront at La Houle is lined with restaurants, ranging from elegant places with pastel cotton napkins folded into wine glasses to creperies with paper place mats. Almost all of these restaurants give place of pride to seafood, and especially oysters.

Cancale also has stretches of coastline that remain much wilder. A trail, at times a little rough, runs along, up, down, and around the headlands.

From the trail, you can see rocky beaches and islands, including the Ile de Rimains, which has a fort built at the end of the 18th Century to plans designed by Vauban. The island is private property and once belonged to the late Lionel Poilane, the famous baker of bread.

As you walk back into town, you can see the variety of stone houses that typify buildings here. While perhaps not as welcoming as houses in some other parts of France, Cancale's houses can have a lot of charm.

Textures

2010-05-30T14:51:00.000-07:00

Morette, Savoie

Le Col de la Colombière

2010-05-30T14:29:00.000-07:00

The Col de la Colombière, a mountain pass in the Savoie that connects the town of Cluses and the ski resort of Le Grand Bornand and then on to Thônes, has frequently served as a mountain stage of the Tour de France, most recently in 2009. From the pass, looking southwest, you can see la Tournette, the mountain that rises opposite the gite where we were staying.

At the pass itself, you find views of the rugged formations of the Aravis range.

As the snow fields melt, they feed streams that tumble from the mountain in long waterfalls.

As Susie and I walked around the pass, a bouquetin (a kind of wild mountain goat) looked down at at us from a ridge just above the pass.

And over the lower ridges, fantastic peaks of the Aravis beckon you to explore further.

The Salomon Contemporary Art Foundation

2010-05-30T13:50:00.000-07:00

A renovated 16th-Century chateau, in the village of Alex, between Thônes and Annecy, houses the Salomon Contemporary Art Foundation. This unexpected and delightful museum, more properly called the la Fondation pour l'Art C o ntem porain Claudine et Jean-Marc Salomon, presents truly contemporary work that reflects the artistic judgment of the Foundation's founders, who created the Salomon ski (and now snowboard) equipment and apparel giant.

The museum's building, the chateau d’Arenthon, contains three floors of galleries, plus a gift shop and a salon de thé/library. After seeing the exposition with Susie, I skimmed a great book on Shepard Fairey while sipping a soft drink. Sculpture gardens surround the chateau.

The current exposition, "Collection 3," shows works from the private collection of Claudine et Jean-Marc Salomon, primarily figurative drawings and paintings. The exposition displays its most abstract works in the top-floor gallery.

The exposition contains many memorable works, all by artists born after 1960. One fun piece was Shepard Fairey's ersatz record label for "The Last of the Rebel Waltzers," part of an extensive series of related works. This particular work includes several long-running Fairey motifs, including "OBEY" and the abstract Andre-the-Giant-in-a-star logo. You can buy (at exceptionally reasonably prices) original works directly from Shepard Fairey at his Web site, obeygiant.com.

This large untitled work by Olivier Masmonteil struck me as a clever commentary on the relationship between landcape and abstract painting.

The building itself is interesting, combining Gothic architecture and contemporary art. Here's a view of across the entry toward a circular stairwell visible through a window.

Dueling Flowers

2010-05-29T15:04:00.000-07:00

In a recent posting, Susie shared some of her pictures of the flowers we'd seen on our hikes in the mountains of the Savoie. These come up awfully fast as the snow melts. M. Credoz said that the leaves had only been out on the trees for about three weeks, and that he had watched the spring climb the slopes as trees higher and higher up leafed out.

Anyway, to pay tribute to these inspiring signposts of spring, and to complement Susie's posting, here are some of my floral photos, principally from our hike to the Plan du Tour.

La Montagne de Sullens

2010-05-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

Susie's and my last longish hike in the Savoie was on the west side of the Montagne de Sullens, which rises, southeast of Thônes, to just over 6,000 feet. Starting out below the Col du Plan de Bois, the trail wound its way around the northwest slope of the Montagne de Sullens. We could see across the valley clear to the Col de la Croix Fry, where we'd started a hike a few days earlier.

And in the valley below was the village of Manigod.

To our east rose the Aravis mountain range, with the pyramidal Pointe de Merdassier and the jagged Etale. There's a trail up the ridge of the Merdassier, but taking it involves climbing something like 2650 feet straight up.

The slopes of the Montagne de Sullens were dotted with chalets for working farms. This 0ne had laundry hanging out to dry. Note the massive protection against avalanches and falling rocks.

Our path wound south, with the Montagne de Sullens on our right, and the pass of the Plan du Tour ahead, as our goal.

The Montagne de Sullens, at least on its east face, is awfully barren. It reminds me of mountains in Scotland, perhaps not coincidentally because in both places sheep or goats have probably eaten most of the vegetation.

While the goats continued to munch, off to our right, we reached the Plan du Tour, having climbed about 1,400 feet along the way. At the pass, we enjoyed the great vista to the south before retracing our steps downhill to the car.

Le Plateau de Glières

2010-05-29T12:37:00.000-07:00

Thônes, the nearest city to our Savoie gite, lies in the valley of the Fiers river. The river runs below high sedimentary formations; the heights just west and north of Thônes are the Plateau de Glières, whose great cliffs give the formation the look of a natural fortress.

Interesting waterfalls, including this spectacular twisting torrent, drop from the top of the cliffs toward the Fier.

People had lived around the plateau for thousands of years. Indeed, there's a major archeological site at the foot of the plateau, along the river Fier, near the town of la Balme-de-Thuy. Human beings began living in a shelter under the cliffs--a shallow cave, really--between 9 and 10 thousand years ago. Thones's city mu seum displays some of the items found at the site. People can only visit the site a few times a year, as it's still under active archeological study.

In World War II, the Plateau de Glières served as the setting for the Battle of Glières, between the Free French fighters, called the Maquis, and the combined forces of the Vichy regime and the Third Reich. By the winter of 1943-1944 the Maquis had conducted attacks on Vichy forces and was preparing to support the Allied invasion of France, then expected to take place in the spring of 1944. The British forces chose the Plateau de Glières as the best site at which to parachute loads of weapons and other supplies for the Maquis.

The situation on the top of the plateau was harsh, with cold and snow and with little food. The 270 or so Maquis soldiers, led by Lt. Théodose Morel (nicknamed "Tom"), were there to collect the parachuted supplies. However, the major drops were delayed. The first big air drop didn't occur until the 10th of March; Tom had been killed that morning in action at Entremont. After the drop, the Vichy forces, the "Milice," tried to attack the Maquis on the plateau but were beaten back. The Germans then brought in 14,000 troops plus 4,000 Vichy soldiers to stop the Maquis. Despite the long odds against them, the Maquis held out for days on the plateau. But faced with overwhelming Axis forces, they were forced to withdraw. Many of the Maquis were killed in combat, captured and then executed, or captured and tortured to death. Among those on the plateau killed by the Germans was Edouard Credoz, the uncle of one of the owners of our gite; at his death, Edouard Credoz was not yet 19 years old.

Edouard Credoz, "Tom" Morel, and 103 other French and Spanish dead, killed in the fight against the Axis, lie in graves in the Nécropole Nationale des Glières, in the hamlet of Morette, on the north bank of the Fier, opposite the south flanks of the Plateau de Glières. Many of the dead had been summarily executed in the field next to the memorial. The Germans planned to throw the bodies into a lime pit, but the mayor of Thônes, at great personal risk, managed to organize a proper burial.

Lt. Morel had first been buried on the top of the snow-covered plateau, during the fighting. His remains were later moved to the Glières Nécropole and are remembered with one of the cemetery's bronze markers.

The site of the memorial includes, in addition to the cemetery, three buildings that comprise the Musée départemental de la Résistance and the Mémorial départemental de la Déportation. The Resistance Museum is housed in a chalet, moved to the site, of the kind in which the Maquis sought shelter.

These museums educate visitors about the history of the resistance in Savoie and about the Nazi's deportation and murder of millions. The exhibits are well done, fascinating, and moving.

I'm glad to note that, while we were there, groups of school children toured the site and the museums.

In death, the resistance fighters buried at the Glières cemetery inspired other resistance forces in France, and especially in the Savoie, which was the only region in France to be liberated by resistance forces. The city of Annecy was the last German stronghold in the region to fall. The operations of the Maquis were daring and resourceful, capturing hundreds of Nazi soldiers and quickly obtaining the commander's surrender. The resistance forces drove their trucks into the liberated city.

Today, the memorials and museums serve to keep alive the history and memory of the resistance fighters of the Plateau de Glières. And the Glières cliffs, once a defense against Nazi attacks, now have a much happier role as an aerial playground for parapenters.

Textures

2010-05-28T14:01:00.000-07:00

Savoie

Mont Blanc

2010-05-28T13:56:00.000-07:00

When Susie and I visited Chamonix earlier this week, this was actually the second time in about a week that we'd been close to Mont Blanc. When we flew back from Malta to Paris, our plane took us right over the Alps, with this view of Mont Blanc.

Things That Do Not Translate Well

2010-05-28T13:55:00.001-07:00

Actually, this is a charming village at the foot of the Glieres Plateau.

Annecy

2010-05-28T13:39:00.000-07:00

On our way to Geneva on Thursday to visit relatives, Susie and I took a little time to stroll through the old section of Annecy, capital of the Haute-Savoie department. Annecy is a gracious resort city and France's proposed host city for the 2018 Winter Olympics. The medieval part of Annecy was built around the castle of the Dukes of Savoie, whose descendant Victor Emmanuel II eventually united and ruled over Italy, at the cost of ceding Savoie (and Nice) to France.

Some of the medieval streets, in concentric circles around the base of the chateau, have massive arcades.

Water flows through medieval Annecy in multiple channels of the Thiou Canal, so this area is called "Little Venice."

The buildings along the canal are picturesque, and perhaps self-consciously so.

The various channels of the canal are so pervasive and complex that one of them actually flows right under the city's cathedral.

As a resort city, Annecy has all the attractions a visitor could want, including artisanal ice-cream shops. If you ever wanted to know what a smurf tastes like, here's your chance. One of these flavors is "Schtroumpf," which is what smurfs are called in France.

Where the canal meets the Lac d'Annecy, boats lie ready to give rides to visitors.

Tomme Fermière

2010-05-27T11:01:00.000-07:00

La Belle Fleurie, the farm a 100 meters or so from our gite outside Thônes, produces tomme fermiere. Tomme is one of the two main cheeses of Savoie, the other being reblochon--a mural on the highway to Thones depicts the city as the capital of reblochon. Fermiere means that it's an artisanal, farm-produced cheese. We visited La Belle Fleurie twice, in the morning and again in the late afternoon, to tour the cheese-making facility and to see the cows being milked.

The owners of La Belle Fleurie, Arlette and Henri Clavel, were kind enough to show us their farm. M. Clavel milks the cows twice a day, every day, at 5:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. Every cow has a name, such as Dahlia. The cows come to the stable from the fields.

The farm has about 40 cows, of which 21 are currently milk cows. They are all of the Abondance breed, the traditional breed of cows in the Haute-Savoie.

The cows take their places in the stable. M. Clavel said that cows have highly hierarchical relationships, with a chief cow. The cows all have bells because, Mme. Clavel explained, she and her husband like the sound and, more practically, the bells make it possible to know where the cows are, to hear if they're agitated, and to find a lost cow.

Some of the bells are simple. Others are ornate. This one has symbols of the Savoie, including the Savoie coat of arms, a pine tree, and a chalet.

The cows are milked by machine, four at a time. It takes about 45 minutes to milk the entire herd.

While you're being milked, why not enjoy the salt lick?

The farm uses organic methods, and its cheese is certified as "biologique." M. Clavel even studied homeopathy so he could treat the cows. The cows eat meadow hay from nearby fields, all grown naturally, unseeded, and without pesticides. During the summer, each cow eats about 2.5 kilos of hay a day, in addition to what they eat in the pastures. In the winter, when the cows have to stay inside, they eat hay that's been stored for the season, about 120 tons of it. M. Clavel showed us some of the meadow hay--it's almost something that you'd buy in a fancy store for use in sachets. The field next to our gite is one of the fields that M. Clavel cuts for hay, and it's brimming with flowers.

After being milked, the cows get a helping of organic grain as a treat, and then they head back down to the pastures.

Mme. Clavel uses the raw milk from the cows to make the tomme fermiere. The farm's particular niche is an organic, soft tomme, unusual in the market. The milk, with a curdling agent, is heated in a stainless steel cauldron. The curds are mixed, then pressed into molds and left to drain. The farm produces about 15 cheeses from each milking, so this is truly the opposite of industrial farming.

The new cheeses are put in a drying room for a week. After that, they're moved to the "cave," where they age for about a month anda half. The natural mold in the cave grows on the surface of the cheeses, forming what Mme. Clavel called "cat hair." The newest cheeses have the mold patted down and are turned over every day. The cheeses that have aged the longest are turned once a week.

The Belle Fleurie farm sells most of its product itself, some to local buyers and some to buyers in Paris and Germany. A small part of the production is sold to an affineur, who ages the new cheeses himself. All of cheeses aged at la Belle Fleurie are stored in the cave.

For M. and Mme. Clavel, this is clearly a labor of love. They care deeply about their cow, about organic farming, and about traditional methods of making cheese. Eight years ago they left salaried city jobs to start their farm. Today, they sell all the cheese they make, and could probably sell much more if they had it. M. Clavel does not wear a watch, nor does he have a cell phone. They work every day, day and night. It's only in the last few years that they've taken any vacation at all, and that's been limited to about four days a year. Indeed, it's hard for them to relax on vacation, because even though while they're gone the farm is in the hands of an experienced farmer/cheese-maker, their minds are always on their cows.

Chamonix

2010-05-27T03:20:00.000-07:00

On Monday (yet another French holiday in May), Susie and I drove from Thones to Chamonix. Driving in Chamonix, never easy, was made even worse by construction projects that sent cars in confusing loops through the city center. After finding a place to park, we walked through the pedestrian district and each had a salade Savoyarde for lunch at a sidewalk cafe. Downtown Chamonix reflects its role as the most celebrated tourist attraction of the Savoie and as a center for mountain sports. Restaurants, ski shops, brand-name stores such as Columbia Sportswear and Helly-Hanson, and stores selling specialized sporting goods line the Rue Paccard, named for the first person to reach the summit of Mont Blanc.

Above the city, numerous parapenters crisscross the sky. On the streets, clumps of tourists from all over the world mix cross from shop to shop. If you're not in Chamonix to ski the unpatrolled upper slopes of Mont Blanc, to climb its ice fields or rock faces, or to take to skies as a parapenter, then you are there for one key reason: to take the telepherique to the top of Aiguille du Midi, high on a shoulder of Mont Blanc.

You actually take two telepheriques, one to the Plan de l'Aiguille, and then a second to the Aiguille du Midi. From the Plan de l'Aiguille, the Aiguille du Midi towers above you as rocky height right out of the movies.

The second telepherique travels in a single span, with no intermediate towers. As it nears the top of its climb, it's traveling almost vertically. Chamonix and its valley lie nearly 9,000 feet below.

Finally, you cross through a passage and take an elevator to the top of the Aiguille du Midi, at 12,600 feet.

The cost of the rides is a staggering $53 per person. But when you reach the top and look around, you simply forget about the expense. You're there--amid the snowy spires, surrounded by the peaks of the Alps, and looking out over la Valley Blanche.

In the distance, the Matterhorn's distinctive pyramid makes itself instantly identifiable.

And, up close, above you, looms the massive summit of Mont Blanc, reaching 15,700 feet. The mountain is so big and so close that even my camera's wide-angle setting couldn't take it all in.

From the top of the Aiguille du Midi, you can look back down at the top of the telepherique station, so far above Chamonix.

The telepherique station has a door, guarded by a large panel of serious warnings about risks, that opens to a tunnel through the ice that leads to the slopes of Mont Blanc. Sufficiently serious climbers and skiers take this tunnel to begin their ascents.

Mountaineers who climb Mont Blanc can then ski down from the summit back to the Aiguille du Midi or the Plan de l'Aiguille.

Even from the relative safety of the Aiguille du Midi, the views across Chamonix's valley and its surrounding mountains make you feel like you're at the roof of Europe.

David and Susie in Chamonix

2010-05-25T10:44:00.000-07:00

On the Aiguille du Midi, altitude 12,600 ft

Hiking above the Col de la Croix Fry

2010-05-25T10:33:00.000-07:00

The other day we hiked about four miles on the ridge west of the Col de la Croix Fry, in the Aravis range of the Alps. I picked this hike because it started high (the Col de la Croix Fry is at 1460 meters) and didn't have too much up and down (although there were still some 300 meters of up, and the down turned out to be rugged). The trail, a circuit reaching the Bassin de Colomban, started out with some awe-inspiring views of the Aravis.

The trail had its ups and downs, so to speak. The signage was sometimes great, sometimes seriously misleading; the trail markers turned out to be more reliable than some of the signs. In places the trail was steep, more so at the end of our loop as we descended. On the way up, we encountered this veritable staircase of roots as part of the trail.

Even in late May snow covered parts of the trail. I twice extricated Susie from this patch.

As the snow receded, it was giving way to crocuses. Some parts of the trail itself were carpeted with crocuses. And to the side of the trail they were simply abundant.

Our climb through the forest took us to a meadow with great views back toward the Aravis.

And, not much higher, we could see all the way to Mont Blanc, a little coy in its partial cloak of clouds.

A the top of our hike, at over 1700 meters on the Sur les Frêtes ridge, we had lunch. We could look down (!) to the Pointe de Beauregard, the summit of the La Clusaz ski area. And beyond the valley in which La Clusaz lies, stood the range of the Aravis.

Our Taste of the Savoie

2010-05-25T10:21:00.000-07:00

When we drove into the hamlet where we had reserved our gite we thought we had arrived at the right chalet and asked the woman in front of the house if she were our host. No, she replied, she lives in the next house on the left--you can't miss it. We've been waving hello and goodbye to this woman ever since.

We found the house and our host, who gave us a tour of the gite and welcomed us with a bottle of white wine from the Savoie. We asked her about a place to eat dinner that night, and she suggested the hamlet's own restaurant, a few minutes' walk to the main road. I think the restaurant is run by a married couple, where the husband cooks and the wife takes care of the dining room. The restaurant turned out to be wonderful, with Savoyard specialties. Indeed, the meal was so filling that neither Susie nor I could finish our tartiflettes. I hesitantly asked the wife if would be possible to take home the leftovers. When she learned that we were staying in the gite in the hamlet, she said that she would cover the serving dishes with plastic wrap and let us take them home; we should return the dishes the next day. Susie and I were completely charmed.

Today, after spending the day on an excursion to Chamonix (see Susie's blog for details), when we drove past the house of the woman who gave us directions to the gite we saw her, our host, our host's husband, and a bunch of other people having drinks. So, screwing up our courage and grabbing a bottle of red Savoie wine from the fridge and a couple of glasses, we walked back from the gite to this group. If you'll have us, I said, we'd like to join you--and we've brought wine! We were warmly welcomed. Remember the woman who gave us directions? Our host's mother. Also there were our host's father, a brother, and several other relatives, ranging in age from eight to eighty.

Our host's husband helped us understand a little about the hamlet. It once had several businesses, such as a cafe and a store. But, like in the nearby village of Les Clefs, of which this hamlet forms a part, these businesses had all disappeared by the 1950s, unable to compete in the age of the automobile with the bigger stores in Thônes. The center of Les Clefs still has its city hall and its school, but that's pretty much it. The families who enjoy rural life, and whose jobs don't take them elsewhere, stay, and everyone else leaves, and maybe comes back for weekends. And where circumstances develop, such as heirs fighting each other, a chalet can go abandoned and unmaintained. Nice chalets appear to be pricey--$800,000 and up.

Some aspects of rural life survive, especially dairies. Our host's husband said that the farm further up the gite's little road was an active dairy, making a tomme fermiere cheese. Here are some of the cheeses for sale at the marché in Thônes.

Indeed, you see cows everywhere, and when you don't see them you hear their cowbells. Coming back from Chamonix over the Col de la Colombière we saw two boys driving cows along a lane below us. And nearer Thônes, traffic on the main road backed up for about fifteen minutes as perhaps 20 cows wended their way down and across the road--slowly, eating grass on the shoulders as they went, meandering among the cars. A man and two boys herding the cows eventually got them all across the road on onto a side street.

Back at the gite, we're living la vida local. We'd bought fruit, vegetables, dried tomatoes, bread, rustic ham, and a roasted chicken at the marché Saturday morning in Thônes, and, supplemented by liquids from the supermarket we've been eating simple meals from this bounty for the last couple of days. We relax in front of the gite with a glass of Savoie wine, and have dinner as the sun sets over La Tournette and parapenters soar in the winds and oblique light on the mountain's crest. We can hear insects, birds, and cowbells.

Starting a Week in the Alps

2010-05-23T08:45:00.001-07:00

Susie and I have arrived in a hamlet outside the village of Thônes, which is itself east and uphill of Annecy, in the Savoie. We'll be staying for a week, hiking and writing. Our Internet access is through public wifi from the Thônes Tourism Office; I'm sitting on bench outside the Tourism Office as a I write this.

Susie's blog has nice pictures and great details on our stay so far. Here's one additional picture of the market yesterday in Thônes.

Details

2010-05-23T08:36:00.000-07:00

Details of the Jardin du Luxembourg...

Details

2010-05-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

Details of Paris tables, over and under...

Brocante, near the Cité Universitaire

Les Editeurs, before lunch

La Palette, before dinner

Details

2010-05-20T06:13:00.000-07:00

Some more details from Paris, this time from the stained-glass windows Abbey of St-Germain des Prés.

Textures

2010-05-20T06:11:00.001-07:00

Le Louvre, Paris

High-Tech Patissier

2010-05-20T06:02:00.000-07:00

While some patissiers may have more elegant or ornate displays, and others perhaps have finer pastries, this pastry shop shows its wares in a way I'd never seen before. The pastries and cakes are displayed under individual, counter-weighted bell jars, suggesting, it seems to me, that each item is so special and so desirable that it has its own cover. More than a shop, it's a pastry gallery.

A Brief Visit to the Louvre

2010-05-20T04:56:00.000-07:00

Any visit to the Louvre that would do justice to the museum and its collections would, necessarily, not be brief. The Louvre ranks as one of the world's largest museums and its collections include indisputably the world's most celebrated works of art. So instead of a full account, here's a brief report on some aspects of an afternoon's visit.

The Louvre was originally a sober fortress, built along the Seine in 1190 by king Philippe August. The modern (i.e., 16th Century) Louvre on the site of fortress is the south wing of the Cour Carré, commissioned by Francois I. From the Left Bank, you can walk to the Louvre on the Pont des Arts.

Excavations for the 1989 "Grand Louvre" pyramid and associated remodeling revealed the foundations and moat of Philippe August's castle. Today you can walk around the moat and into the base of the Great Tower, some 15 meters in diameter.

The dry moat had served for centuries as a dumping spot for all sorts of discards. The Louvre's extensive exhibition of the building's history displays many of these items, including coins and clay pipes. The supports for the bridge across the moat still stand.

The Louvre's oldest room is the Crypt Sully (or Lower Hall), which dates from the 12th Century. The columns and vaulting were added between 1230 and 1240.

The Cour Napoleon, just west of the new pyramid, is jammed with traffic because the Louvre is a long building, and there aren't many ways for cars, buses and trucks to get across between the Rue de Rivoli and the quays of the Seine.

Other places in the building remain much quieter, even kind of lost. While some of the courtyards have been roofed over and turned into exhibition space for sculptures, others remain unrestored and tantalizingly inaccessible to the public except by looking through windows.

The great public spaces of the contemporary Louvre lie under I.M. Pei's glass pyramid, the emblem of the Grand Louvre project of the 1980s. I've never warmed to this project, which seemed like a space-age intrusion into Paris's largest-scale and most interesting building. After all, it took Versailles to supplant the Louvre as a palace. The pyramid does provide needed light for the museum's main lobby. The glass slopes and their adjacent basins make for some disconcerting views, though. For example, a couple of kids walked in the narrow gap between the pyramid and a basin, seemingly suspended in a futuristic world.

To stick with the museum's more classical aspects, the Louvre's long wings stretch from the Cour Napoleon to the Jardin des Tuileries. These wings house galleries that, for me, define a museum of art. This gallery is luminous and awe-inspiring. It's actually pretty easy to get lost in this vast set of spaces.

The painting collection includes unbelievably famous works, such as the Mona Lisa. You go from room to room, painting to painting, experiencing the shock of recognition, something like seeing a celebrity in a restaurant. For example, Ingres's Odalisque is today an iconic work, even if at first showing it generated controversy--not because of the nudity but because critics thought that the figure had extra vertebra in her spine!

Similarly, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, in addition to being a great work of art, carries with it both the artist's political message and all of the additional meaning that the painting accumlated through its use as a symbol of freedom.

Details

2010-05-20T04:25:00.000-07:00

All kinds of details of Paris catch the eye. Here are a few details in stone.

Bas-relief on an apartment building

Column at the Pantheon

Bas-relief on the Faculté de Médecine

Textures

2010-05-20T04:21:00.001-07:00

Galeries Lafayette, Paris

Bees in the Jardin du Luxembourg

2010-05-20T04:16:00.000-07:00

Susie, Sheldon, John and I ran across something entirely unexpected during our walk through the Jardin du Luxembourg: beekeepers. All those flowers in the park must be able to support a lot of bees. In fact, there are stacks and stacks of hives in an area toward the southwest corner of the park. You can see a lot of bees flying around the hives.

It turns out that the park has a school for beekeepers, housed in this wonderful building. The park offers other garden-oriented classes, too.

When we were there, the students in a class on beekeeping were donning their protective gear. The park had roped off the area near the bees so that visitors didn't get stung. The students trooped right in among the hives.

Marché at the Place Monge

2010-05-20T03:03:00.000-07:00

One morning Susie and I went to the marché at the Place Monge, both just to see the market and possibly to find a hat for me to wear while walking around Paris. The Place Monge, one of the least touristy parts of the 5th Arrondissement, still has something of an authentic neighborhood feel. It's about a block away from the Arenes de Lutece.

Unlike many other markets that now primarily sell dry goods, the market at the Place Monge still centers on foods, ranging from seafood to organic vegetables. Yet, luckily for us, pretty much the first vendor we encountered was a seller of hats, Serge, who had recently closed his regular store in favor of selling at marchés. He had exactly the hat I needed, which I bought after Susie and I talked with him for a while. He likes to travel the world to pursue his passion: catch-and-release fly fishing.

Much of the produce is organic ("AB" = agriculture biologique).

The vegetables are great: the eggplants are small and the red peppers are huge.

Want olives? Choose from among a dozen varieties, not just different flavors of the same olive, as you get in California.

The fish, dramatically displayed on a bed of shaved ice, are perfect.

And if you're interested in something a little heartier, how about a portion of this choucroute garnie?

Travel Plans, Blog Plans

2010-05-19T13:41:00.000-07:00

In the last few days Susie and I have been to Malta and back. I presented a paper at an interesting workshop on multimodal corpora, part of the LREC 2010 conference. I've still got a number of items to post about Paris, so I'll get to those first before I write about Malta. Moreover, on Friday we're heading for a week in the Alps; I'm hoping to take alpine hikes and work on some journal papers. We'll be in a the countryside near a hamlet some distance from Annecy, so I figure that Internet connectivity could be sporadic. As a result, postings on the blog may be bursty--if you see a new post, please work your way back through the succession of new items.

Textures

2010-05-19T13:36:00.001-07:00

Galeries Lafayette, Paris

Flowers in the Jardin du Luxembourg

2010-05-19T13:30:00.000-07:00

As near as I can tell, the city of Paris is not an official "ville fleurie." Nevertheless, some parts of Paris have spectacular beds of flowers. Here are a few views from the Jardin du Luxembourg on May 8th.

Contrasts

2010-05-19T13:29:00.001-07:00

Paris

In the Footsteps of My Childhood

2010-05-19T12:40:00.000-07:00

As a child I lived in Paris for three years corresponding to the academic years 1953-54, 1962-63, and 1967-68. Of the first year I, understandably, have no memories. I can recall the other two years with great clarity. So with Susie, and our friends John and Sheldon in tow, I set out to revisit some of the places I remember.

In 1962-63 my family and I lived on the Boulevard Saint Germain, just east of the Place Maubert. The building is actually more modern than that in my mind's eye, perhaps because in 1963 it hadn't yet been cleaned. At that time Paris was emerging from a century or more of coal grime. Systematic cleaning of buildings in the Sixties and Seventies transformed the city's color from dark gray or black to the light limestone tan you see today.

Our building had two stores on the ground floor, one of which was--and still is--La Joie Pour Tous, a toy store. The store's sign and display have both changed, the sign from a monochromatic serif font on a dark background to colorful all-caps sans-serif letters on a light background, and the display from a classic range of toys, such as boats for sailing on the pond at the Jardin du Luxembourg to a more crowded collection of boxes and costumes.

Nearby in our neighborhood were a couple of businesses that stand out for me now. One was a Chinese restaurant, called "Au Pays du Sourire," which still exists on the corner of the Rue de Bievre. The other was "Au Vieux Campeur," a outdoor-goods store on the Rue des Ecoles, which seems to be still thriving.

Every school-day morning my dad would accompany my brother Adam and me to catch the commuter train to our school, which was located in a suburb south of Paris. We would walk up the Rue de la Montagne Ste-Genevieve, a narrow, climbing street.

At the top of the montagne, so to speak, we would pass the church of St-Etienne du Mont. I don't recall ever having gone into this building. On this trip, though, we all went inside to find a surprisingly luminous and interesting church.

Across the corner from the church sits the massive bulk of the Pantheon, which we would, of course, also pass each morning.

In 1962-63, the commuter railroad south began at what was then called the Gare de Luxembourg. The RER system wasn't yet in place, and what is now the Luxembourg RER station was the start of the line, which was called the Ligne de Sceaux. The station still looks pretty much like it did in the Sixties.

The Ligne de Sceaux carried my brother and me south to the Parc de Sceaux station. From there, it was about two blocks to our school, the Ecole Nouvelle d'Antony. The school still exists. Indeed, in the 1990s I had colleagues from the Paris area who enrolled their children there.

The school's main building, which in 1962 was the school's only building, seems smaller to me now than it did when I was ten. In the spring there was a sort of history day where students gave presentations for the assembled parents. The performers, including me as a Phoenician, stood on the school's steps, with the audience standing below.

The school now has another, newer building, and a nice playground that I don't really remember.

The recess periods I remember the most involved walking as a class over the to the nearby Parc de Sceaux, a vast formal garden built by Le Notre for Colbert.

The park today is a much livelier, well-kept place than it was in the Sixties. Runners follow clean paths beside robust fountains rising from clear ponds. When I was a kid, the park was much sleepier. There were few visitors, the paths were covered with leaves, the fountains didn't play, and the ponds were full of aquatic plants--so much so that for a while I had the impression that the area was a sewage treatment plant. Since then, park has been beautifully restored, with cascades of fountains coming down to the main pond.

When not at school, my brother and I sometimes played in the Arènes de Lutèce, the arena for Roman Paris.

The Arènes are still there, and looking better than ever. Other kids from the neighborhood would come by on afternoons and weekends for pick-up soccer games on the terrain where gladiators fought wild beasts.

A class of schoolchildren visited the Arènes while Susie and I were there.

A third place for recreation was the Jardin du Luxembourg, which are the formal gardens for the Palais de Luxembourg, built for Marie de Medicis and now the home of the French Senate. The Jardin remains hugely popular--perhaps even more so than in the Sixties because the garden's chairs are now free. When I was a kid, as soon as you sat down a person would come by to collect a franc.

At age ten, the big attraction for me was the chance to sail a model boat on the circular pond in front of the palace. For a modest sum, you could rent a boat (and a stick) for an hour and run from one side of the pond to the other to turn the boat around when it reached an edge. I saved up my allowance for many weeks and bought, at La Joie Pour Tous, my own sailboat.

The rental boats today have colored sails, but the fun is clearly still there for new generations of Parisian kids.

In 1967-68 we still lived in the 5th Arrondissement, but this time on the Rue du Val de Grace--fairly near the Luxembourg RER station, in fact.

At the end of our block, on the other side of the Rue St-Jacques, stood the chapel of the Hopital du Val de Grace, an imposing baroque pile. I never saw the inside of that church, either, and I'm not even sure how you'd get in.

Our building still stands on the north side of the street. From our apartment's balcony you could look left and see the Val de Grace.

In 1967-68 Adam and I attended the Lycee de Sevres, which had an international section. Susie and I have friends in Paris with school-age children; these friends indicated that the Lycee de Sevres was still highly popular with expatriates here. Going to school involve a bus ride to the Gare Montparnasse and then a train ride to Sevres. That year, the year of Mai '68, the strikes, Danny-le-Rouge, tear gas, riot cops, burned cars, occupied buildings, and exhilaration, will have to wait till future post so that I can do it justice.

The End of Verlaine's Story

2010-05-14T23:59:00.000-07:00

Months ago I posted about Metz's native son, the stormy poet Paul Verlaine. He's pictured here in a posthumous portrait from 1906 by Natalie Gontcharova (Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, from the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris).

Verlaine's life ended in Paris, in this 5th-Arondissement building, which now houses a restaurant called La Maison de Verlaine.

Roof Lines in Paris

2010-05-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

When in Paris, if you look up, you'll see a collection of fantastical designs for roofs, often peaking with a dome on the building's corner.

So here is a collection of remarkable roof lines, some domed, ...

others angular, …

some both curved and angular, …

some taken over by plants, and others that just look like they'd be a cool place to live.

Textures

2010-05-14T14:29:00.001-07:00

Paris

Locks of Love

2010-05-14T14:25:00.000-07:00

The Pont des Arts, which bridges the Seine from the Academie de France over to east end of the Louvre, has turned into an informal monument to love. People expressing the eternity of their love lock a padlock, usually with their initials or names on it, on the wire of the bridge's railing. Hundreds of locks now decorate the Pont des Arts.

Apparently this fad was already happening on other bridges around the world and has now reached Paris, much to the city's dismay at having a charming pedestrian bridge effectively scrawled upon with metal graffiti. The trend has grown to the point where the press has taken notice.

Until you can't see the Seine anymore, or until the bridge collapses from their weight, the locks constitute a kind of folk-art exhibit. Passers-by can see locks that apparently were left by all kinds of people, with all kinds of messages.

More on the Centre Pompidou - Metz

2010-05-14T14:22:00.000-07:00

The crowds continue to build for the new Centre Pompidou - Metz. The local paper report two-hour waits for Wednesday, and the word on the street has it that the waits are up to three hours. Susie saw the lines around 11:15 a.m. this morning, and they were longer than Wednesday's lines.

Although the streets were eerily deserted yesterday--Ascension is a national holiday--they teemed today, with many people who looked and sounded like visitors. At lunch, the women sitting next to us had just arrived in Metz, and hadn't even made it yet to their hotel. Taking the renamed "Artis" minibus, we ended up riding for free because the driver had run out tickets.

A few more things about the exhibition itself stand out as worth discussing. As I mentioned Wednesday, the exhibition includes works of various kinds, including traditional paintings, sculptures, videos, audios, and installations. All of the works were identified by a nearby card, about 5x6 inches, attached to the wall. I looked at one card, which didn't seem to be associated with any particular painting or sculpture, entitled "1234." As it turned out, 1234 is an audio work, eight seconds long, that is played throughout the museum at 12:34 p.m. each day. We were still waiting in line when (and if) it played, so we'll have to come back some other time for it.

There's an enormous installation by a French artist called Ben, entitled something like "Ben's Store." It's a kind of building containing and decorated with things that had to have been retrieved from garage and attic sales across France--parts of dolls, buckets, you name it. I went by this work rather quickly, having realized that it would take me most of a day to perceive and understand everything there.

There's a conceptual piece called "Three Chairs" that consists of an actual chair, a life-sized picture of the chair, and a definition of the word chair. Having just taught a semester's worth of Natural Language Processing, where we worked a lot on representing semantics, this work appealed to me a lot.

To me, aside from the great works themselves, the best part of the exhibition was the floor with the works in one long gallery and the history of each work in a parallel gallery, with space to look from one gallery to the other. The history sometimes featured written or graphical materials and sometimes videos.

Maybe by the time we get back to Metz before heading home to El Paso we'll have time to explore the Centre Pompidou - Metz with greater depth.

Centre Pompidou - Metz: Day One

2010-05-12T13:09:00.001-07:00

After years of planning and construction, after months of build-up, and after even a restructuring of bus routes, the Centre Pompidou - Metz opened its doors to the public this morning for the very first time. The original Centre Pompidou in Paris promoted its sister museum with a giant banner.

Metz's new museum, likened to the Guggenheim's branch in Bilbao as a modern cultural treasure that could revitalize an economically disadvantaged region, captured the attention of the world's press. The press reports of the opening did not laud Metz for its own merits. Rather, Metz is "a military town off the tourist circuit." Reviews tended to lead with the wonder and strangeness of the museum's building, which was inspired by a Chinese hat.

Off the tourist circuit or not, the museum drew huge crowds for its opening day, many from out of town. In line with us as we waited to enter were a group of women from Paris who had never before visited Metz but were here for the opening. Many Germans were in the crowds, too. We arrived at about 12:15 p.m., and had about a 30-minute wait to get into the building. Then, shades of Disneyland's hidden lines, we waited in another series of lines to get into the galleries. As the afternoon wore on, the lines got longer and longer, stretching away from the museum to the edges of its esplanade.

The museum's inaugural exhibition, "Masterworks?," occupied all four floors of galleries. The ground floor's theme was the history of masterworks in art, and this story fittingly began with a 9th-Century ivory coffret from the School of Metz as its very first item. Other local masterworks, including a remarkably ornate crystal chandelier from the St-Louis glassworks, helped to tie the exposition to the region and strengthen the relationship of the museum to its location.

The exhibition eventually moved to more modern works, including pieces by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, Ellsworth Kelly, Jackson Pollock, Fernand Leger--too many to recount, actually. The Pompidou Center has lent some 700 of its works, and other museums have lent another 100 or so. This show knocks your socks off. It culminated on the fourth floor with ultra-contemporary works. Along the way, there were simply marvelous works of all kinds, including this study by Theo van Doesburg for the projection wall of his Cine-Dansing de l'Aubette, of which I'd seen a model at the Strasbourg Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.

One of the key parts of the exhibition was the treatment of museums in France since 1937 as possible masterworks in themselves, which fit well with how the Centre Pompidou - Metz is being reviewed. An architect's model of the museum shows its real structure, not clearly understandable as you look at the finished building.

The top-floor gallery points, on its northwest end, toward Metz's center city and its cathedral. The arrangement of the walls makes the cathedral loom large as you enter the gallery and recede as you move toward it.

The view toward Metz, at the end of the exhibition, drew visitors like a porch light draws moths. It struck me, looking at the museum visitors looking at the city, that while the museum draws people away from the center of Metz, it ends up returning their focus to the city itself.

Textures

2010-05-12T02:05:00.000-07:00

Arènes de Lutèce, Paris